ROLL ON COWBOY

FOLLOWING ON FROM MY PREVIOUS POST, the imagination shown by some killers in the USA has definitely reached new heights today in (where else?) the Lone Star State of Texas. Deep in the heart, indeed, of North Texas, in Grand Prairie, a gunman opened fire, killing six people and wounding at least three others, before turning the gun on himself.

ACCORDING TO THE SPOKESMAN for the Grand Prairie Police Department, Mr John Brimmer, "This was a domestic situation that went south in a hurry." The shooting took place at Forum Roller World roller rink, which had been rented out for a private birthday party at which only family and friends were present.

I'M IN LOVE WITH A FAIRYTALE

UNLIKE IN THE USA, where occasionally someone packs a few firearms and “shoots up” a diner, restaurant, high school gymnasium, drive-in movie forecourt or, if they are really adventurous, a Ferris wheel or rollercoaster in an amusement park, we do not have a great tradition of such antics in Europe, and much less so in Norway, a country about which hardly anyone to whom I have spoken over the last few days has the slightest clue apart from a restaurant owner friend of mine who used to work on ferry boats going from Hull, in England, to “somewhere in Norway”, as he put it.

THUS THE RECENT EVENTS in Oslo and on Utoya island have come as a dual shock for all of us: A massacre? and Where?

IT WAS ONLY THIS SPRING that I read and then heard with some amazement a statement from a lady minister in the Norwegian parliament who, somewhat gloatingly, told the wider world (it was a slow news day) that Norwegian police stations had started closing at four o’clock in the afternoon as there was “nothing for the police to do” and so they could go “home to their families for early dinner”.

I SUSPECT THAT MANY POLICEMEN in Norway will be spending less time with their loved ones eating the famous Norwegian delicacy of boiled potatoes in salt water over the coming weeks and months. And perhaps they might have spent their time a little better in the past trawling through the websites that we are now discovering have existed in some numbers containing diatribes and tirades against the socialist government’s policy of altering the make-up of Norwegian society over the last five years through all-inclusive multiculturalism and multiracialism, an attitude guaranteed to anger the multitude of right wing nutters who inhabit Norway and secretly long for the SS, the Abwehr and the Gestapo Quislingism to return to their great white nation.

THE TERM “RIGHT WING NUTTER”, along with “lone wolf”, “wayward lunatic”, as well as others, are being bandied about so often by the written and visual media that it is clear there is a plan afoot to make us all – particularly the immigrant communities in traditionally closed countries – feel safe in our beds.

AT LEAST IN THE USA these events are perpetrated (perpetuated, according to Hillary Clinton just now) by maniacs in the traditional sense, who usually have the decorum to blow their own heads off after killing their teacher, the owner of the cinema which isn’t showing the latest Harry Potter movie or the ex-boyfriend who called them “spotty”, thus saving many tax dollars in expensive trials.

YET OUR NORWEGIAN ASSASSIN has made it clear that he wishes to go to court, admitting that he killed all these people but he has broken no laws and that he will make a statement to the public on Monday. The words “copycat” and “lone wolf” in the same sentence suggest flippancy on my part and on that of journalists abroad; yet Anders Behring Breivik hadn’t and hasn’t flipped: no lunatic leaves a 1500 page manifesto on the Internet, in English, Norwegian and Latin. The Norwegian – and more importantly the British – police should be busy trying to find out how many thousands of “nutters” are downloading his writings.

IN NORWAY IT IS NOT JUST boyish, insipid Eurovision hero Alexander Rybak who is in love with a fairytale beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed girlie from Norwegian mythology. At least he only bothered the wider world with his irritating voice and scratchy violin.

DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES

THERE ARE OCCASIONS in the news of our world when we have to be careful in whom we confide. There is, of course, the local policeman, Mr Stephenson, or his best friend Detective Yates, whom everyone knows will be rocks of trustworthiness and good, old fashioned sense. Then there is the newsagent, Mr Murdoch, and his flame-haired, much younger “companion”, Mrs Brooks and her invalid, unsupportive henchman Mr Coulson.

ALL OF THESE PEOPLE MAKE UP the rather curious assemblage of souls who inhabit the close circle of 10 Downing Street with our goody-goody two-shoes PM, a chap who enjoys “a challenge” and a “good game”; the knockout whist being played at the moment is leading to discards beyond anyone’s idea of the maximum. Cameron is having his friends “knocked out” of the game before the slime gets to him. One cannot help thinking that, if the summer does not provide the much-needed silence, he will be looking for someone high up to take a fall, and, given that the police are resigning of their own accord, moving fingers are slowing down and starting to point at the pleasant visage of Home Secretary Theresa May, who is already hated by almost everyone who comes into contact with her.

THUS IF CAMERON SURVIVES THIS it is because he is not as floppy-dopey as he looks and/or he has “proper” intelligent chaps who are loyal to him. The last week, and the next week in particular, have and will show that this current government is as corrupt as we have had since the glory days of the sixties. Those who may have thought that Cameron was any different to the useless, money- and land-hugging Tories of the past before Margaret Thatcher must have shit in their eyes. Which may not be a disadvantage to them as they survey the political landscape.

LIKE IN THE VOICEOVER OF SOME MELODRAMATIC TV SERIES. just when we think that all is fine and that we are getting on with our neighbours, our children are in bed, snug and safe, there is that restless feeling that makes us turn over once, then twice, or even thrice, on our soft, cool pillows, trying to settle down before we go to sleep. What, we may think, does tomorrow bring?

TIED UP IN DEBT

AMUSING AS IT IS TO WATCH PORTUGAL’S politicians attempting to deal with a crisis, it is nevertheless difficult to forget that the solutions the government has found to do so are downright daylight robbery from the average people, particularly those who earn the least. The latest measure, announced in a press conference yesterday, is that the lowest-rate pensioners, who receive around 218 Euros (£190) per month if they are lucky, and those who earn less than 550 Euros (£500) – a considerable number of the young people who actually have a job – will still have to pay the special “Christmas tax” this year “as a loan” to the government, which will be “repaid in full”, it was gleefully announced, “in most cases”, in 2012, at a date to be established.

MOST PEOPLE HERE KNOW THAT Portuguese politicians, in keeping with the characteristics of the Portuguese race, would rather eat their own babies than give anyone any money back, so the prevailing glumness is because the next two Christmases will not be as merry as they once were.

YET SOME SOLUTIONS FOUND for the crisis abound in good sense and far-sightedness, if not decorum. This is perhaps the case of the measures announced yesterday by the new Minister for Agriculture, the Sea, the Environment and Territorial Administration (I kid you not), the good lady Professor Assunção Cristas. Under her “Cool Air” initiative, there will be untold savings for the country by turning off the air conditioning in the ministerial offices between the 1st of June and the 30th of September.

THOSE OF US WHO HAVE WORKED in the stinking, polluted hole that is downtown Lisbon in the summer will know that the average temperature in July or August is a sweat-dripping 34º Centigrade, made even less tolerable by the cramped, insect- and rat-infected, non-Feng Shui premises of most public buildings.

YET HELP IS AT HAND. The canny minister has unusually foreseen the problem and anticipated a solution. Male civil servants will be allowed to work without wearing a tie during these months, which will, according to law teacher Cristas, make it possible to allow an increase of temperature of about “three to four” degrees.

GIRLIE CRISTAS, WHO WAS BORN IN AFRICA and represents the CDS-PP, the only party representative of the extreme right in the Portuguese parliament, obviously knows how to deal with temperature. Yet when asked yesterday by one of those rare journalists who question their leaders in Portugal as to whether the heating would be turned off in the winter, and the clerks would come to work in coats, she declined to answer.

MY SUGGESTION FOR BOOSTING TEMPERATURE over the winter months would be as simple as the minister’s for the summer. Men could go without ties in the summer, and female clerks could take their skirts and blouses off in the winter. This would have the dual advantage of keeping the temperature up, and steaming over the windows in ministerial offices, so no one would be able to see what was going on inside this humungous ministry.

(My picture shows the recommended dress code for male ministerial civil servants in Portugal the last time anyone actually did any work.)

THE END OF THE WORLD

NEWS OF THE END OF the News of the World has provoked both glee and gnashing of teeth among analysts, twits and the chattering classes in general. Obviously, the end of a Sunday newspaper that has lasted 168 years and has recently been selling five million hard copies every week (their claim of 7.5 million must include the online edition) is a disaster for our press system in general, but an opportunity with a big O for other unscrupulous (read “enterprising”) publishers in their race to fill the gap.

“MILLIONS CAN’T BE WRONG” was a slogan often used by cunning advertisers in the late nineteen fifties and early nineteen sixties when our current consumer society was taking its baby steps, and this was usually a guarantee, for “thinking types”, that the product was piss-poor beyond redemption and thus to be touched only with the proverbial barge pole. To some extent this is true of the NOTW, which had to commit crimes to grant these millions what they were looking for.

THE MILLIONS, HOWEVER, who regularly bought Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World were perhaps not in a mood to be right or wrong, but merely to be amused by reading the nation’s best scandal sheet, exposing gay orgies involving vicars, result fixing at cricket matches, political faux pas, corruption at the highest level and generally letting us know who was shagging whom, and sometimes how often, how and where. Should there be anyone in the dark as to the business of this august organ, I suggest a sneak peek at www.newsoftheworld.co.uk where all will be revealed, as they sometimes say.

I WAS NEVER AN AVID reader of this type of newspaper, but nevertheless I feel it is a shame to see tradition going the way of all flesh. “We must all take responsibility for this”, stated Janet Street Porter on TV on Loose Women yesterday. “We buy these papers and we love them,” she went on, and the newspaper editors simply provide us with what we want and deserve, even if they have to be deceitful or even criminal to get it.

AS THERE IS A SLIGHT CHANCE that David Cameron, in being personal friends with the harridan Rebekah Wade, editor at the time of all the illegal activity, and in employing (and defending) Andrew Coulson, equally involved in authorising phone hacking (and committing perjury over it) may also be dragged down through this scandal, my reaction is one of horror. How can David Cameron be anything but as pure and innocent as the driven snow? Surely 11 million people who voted Tory can’t be wrong?

ÇA PLANE POUR MOI

I SHOULD PERHAPS BEGIN BY STATING that I have no particular wish to “diss”, as our young skateboarding and rapping community says nowadays, the great nation of Canada or its apologetic and pleasant people, although it would be easy to do so, as they insist on setting themselves up as targets to be popped at like slow-moving ducks on a fairground stall.

THE GREAT WHITE NATION has been favoured over recent centuries as a happy place to usher off the princes of Wales, who have often been troublesome young whippersnappers eager to grab at the throne, as was the case with Edward VII, gnawing at the heels of, or pulling at or hiding under the skirts of his mother the grand Victoria. Canada, then, has been a place to “send the lads off to drink and play”.

AND INDEED IT WAS WITH THIS INTENT that the present princely visit to Canada was arranged and planned; no one among the several entourages knew that William would in the meantime have become a husband. Thus the Royal Protocol has been faced with a problem: should one go ahead with the trip, which was planned to show “our Wills” skiing, sledging, speaking “French”, helicoptering and rescuing Eskimos from the jaws of walruses, eating seal dung and generally “getting it on” with the chaps who otherwise have to have their balls frozen for eleven months of the year? The decison was that cancellation would be wrong.

SCUPPERING THE EVENT HOWEVER, is the girlie and no doubt sweet-smelling presence of touchy-feely, walking-Laura-Ashley-advert the Duchess of Cambridge, née Kate “the” Middleton. Now, judging by the reaction of the screeching banshees and harridan cries of Canadian females, all they want is Kate; our proper future leader, the stolid, wooden, dull, thick-headed William, has been obfuscated by this glamour puss.

AND AT ESSENCE THIS IS THE PROBLEM of the Habsburgs. When was there last a decent mannish man at the helm? When one looks back over recent times we have to go back to Charles II, or possibly his son James II, in the late XVII century, to find a man who could tell his wife what to do and to shut up. Since then we have not had a decent man about the house – either they have been told what to do by their wives whilst kings or just shuffled off into a corner and ignored, like the future Charles III while husband to the murdered Diana Princess of Wales.

AT LEAST PRINCE WILLIAM IS BEING ignored in Canada, where, apparently, television is still in black and white and has a four-second time delay for “live” pictures to come to the BBC, and it is more or less always dark, at least mentally and intellectually. Whatever takes place over this tour it will not be a mould for future performances by this duo. Otherwise one may easily understand how William, like his father before him, could get fed up of his cutie wife outdoing him.

THAT SUMMER FEELING

DESPITE THE FACT THAT summer is upon us and under normal circumstances we might expect Britain should be more concerned about watching cricket and tennis and the price of strawberries, Portugal and Greece should be roasting sardines and slaughtering goats, respectively, and guzzling wine, in both cases, and Syrians should be doing nothing, as usual, the situation in these once mighty nations is far from easy as the dreaded crucial Thursday creeps towards us.

Que Syria, Syria

Presisent Bashar AL-Assad was elected head of Syria in 2000 after his father, the previous democratically-elected president, died. The job had been democratically lined up for his older brother, who died in car accident, which made the Syrian parliament have to lower the age requirements for being president to precisely Bashar’s age, so that everything would be “legal”. As an ophthalmologist, one might have expected Bashar to have a little more foresight in his policies when he noticed what was going on in the Arab Spring, particularly in Libya, which for many years was a single nation with Syria. Tomorrow the pro-democracy protesters, or “Islamic fundamentalists”, or “paid assassins”, or “mad dog criminals”, depending on how one sees the world, intend to hold their greatest movement of the last 106 days.

Elbow Greece

Minnesota-born Georgios Papandreou, the Greek PM, and son and grandson of previous Prime Ministers of Greece – a fact that shows that remarkable coincidences sometimes take place even in democracies – must have learned something from spending most of his life in the USA, Canada, the UK and Sweden, because on becoming prime minister the first thing he did was to honestly announce the state of Greek finances and debt. This led to the first collapse, and so, in a way, he is responsible for the mess. However, what he did not learn in these countries was a sense of democracy, given that the only member of his PASOK party who voted against his austerity measures earlier today has been expelled from his party and will thus lose his seat in parliament.

Allerta Portugalikos

My pun might be lost on those who have not had the benefit of a classical education, but there is very little I can do about that. Pedro Manuel Mamede Passos Coelho, the debonair, matching-tie-and-handkerchief new Portuguese PM and head of the Social Democrat “orange” Party, appears to possess some dignity. However, in a complete volte-face typical of politicians the world over, even before his government has been fully sworn in, he has just announced a special once-only “austerity income tax”, something against which he argued violently when in opposition, and which has not been used as an emergency measure since the time of the hated former PM and president Mário Soares. The outrage caused by this announcement is a rare case of a political honeymoon being over before anyone got their knickers off.

David and Uriah

Yet betrayal and u-turns are best seen at work in the hands of the recent master of these things, our very own David Cameron, cousin to Queen Elizabeth and direct descendant of King William IV. Cameron is also an unelected prime minister, depending upon the support of Nick Clegg and his lily-livered Liberals to stake his claim to office. Yet Cameron is acting as if Clegg does not exist (as is the Liberal Democrat party), pushing though a raft of ultra right economic policies and only conceding to the LibDems in their more fluffy and wooly demands, such as allowing homosexual men to hold hands in the street and to take away CCTV cameras from the doors of wine bars.

PUBLIC AWARENESS OF THE CYNICISM involved in Cameron’s approach is only just becoming apparent; tomorrow will see the largest anti-government protest in Britain since the 1970s, involving 750,000 public sector workers going on a one-day strike as a reaction to the news that their pensions will have to be cut in order to make them viable. This is after increasing student fees from £3,000 to £9,000 in order to allow students to “get a better deal”; after reducing government grants to local councils to less than 20% of what they were five years ago in order “to allow councils to provide better services”; after threatening to sell half of National Health Service provisions to private companies in order “to streamline the service” and give more efficiency “to everybody”; and proposing to reduce prison sentences by 50% in order to “save money” and “produce fairer justice”.

FORTUNATELY, IN THE UNITED KINGDOM WE HAVE an educated middle-class and a responsible, prying press that will not kowtow to politicians, and so the latter two measures were fiercely contested and the government had to back-track, or “listen to the people and respond”, as Cameron put it. As Cameron likes listening so much he will no doubt have his ear to the ground tomorrow.

IN THE OTHER THREE COUNTRIES facing a difficult Thursday neither of these elements are present. Friends of mine sometimes say I am a little harsh on politicians; by comparison this is true. But one single measure in each case in Greece, Spain and Portugal has been enough to ruin the economy. In each case I believe that the ministers responsible were well-meaning, but were as stupid and short-sighted as any Arab despot. In order to stimulate tourism, in a country with a lot of islands and sea with fish in it, the Greek government reduced taxation on charter boats to almost nothing about twenty years ago. The idea was that many entrepreneurs would invest in this profitable and expanding area of tourism. Am I alone in seeing what would happen?

PERHAPS NOT, AS I KNOW OF AT LEAST one journalist who saw what was coming down the pike. Alike laws in Portugal and Ireland had a similar result: in order to stimulate literary writing, both Ireland and Portugal exempted “writers” or “intellectual workers” from income tax (or reduced it to 5% in some cases). No minister ever bothered to define what a “writer” or “intellectual” was. The result in both cases was that hundreds of thousands of independent professional workers such as doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, film directors, actors, real estate brokers, financial advisors and translators – all of whom earning top wages even on a European scale – declared their income as “intellectual work” or “writing” (one article a year in a trade journal would be enough) and were thus spared thousands and thousands of Euros, Escudos and Irish Pounds in tax.

THE GOVERNMENTS OF THESE countries threw away tax income through an ill-thought-out policy. In the Greek case thousands of top-of-the-range yachts have been declared “charter boats” (one paying guest a year will do) and the professionals channel all their tax returns into the “charter business”, even if their main income is being a lawyer. This is a real example of governments getting it wrong; the easy way to recover the lost revenue  and get out of the mess is to increase income tax for the lower classes by 5% or so, or VAT by 11%, or to reduce wages by 20%, as in Greece. Or all three, thereby, whether through error or design, shifting the weight of tax from the upper middle class professionals to the lowest earners. People are protesting on the streets as it is; I imagine that if they knew and understood how their leaders make such stupid mistakes they would be a lot crosser.